LOS ANGELES — It might take the reasoning powers, not to mention the vocabulary, of a Talmudic scholar to figure out what Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks are trying to say with the title of their new Steve Carell comedy.

The current movie is inspired — it is not a remake, says a spokesman for Mr. Roach — by Francis Veber’s 1998 comedy of manners in which polished, well-heeled Frenchmen hold regular dinners where they compete over who can bring the biggest buffoon as his guest.

The French title also includes a term that has a sometimes vulgar meaning yet can be translated as “Dinner for Idiots” — though it was actually released in English as “The Dinner Game.”

A few weeks ago, Debbie Schlussel — a kind of all-purpose film critic, political commentator and Web opinion spinner — took issue not just with the trailer promoting “Dinner for Schmucks,” about which she wrote on her Web site, debbieschlussel.com, “it looks like utter garbage,” but also with its use of Yiddish.

“The more correct title would have been ‘Dinner for Schlemiels,’ ” Ms. Schlussel insisted, if the filmmakers were trying to describe the geeky behavior displayed Mr. Carell in the pratfall-filled trailer.

The Online Etymology Dictionary would seem to agree, as a schlemiel is described as an “awkward, clumsy person,” while the sort of “contemptible person” referred to in the title would seem more like the characters, one of them played by Paul Rudd, who act like jerks by giving the dinner.

Photo

The director Jay Roach.Credit
Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Actually, Mr. Carell’s character has a bit of the shmendrik about him because he seems quite stupid, and he is a hopeless shlimazl, with obvious bad luck. And yet in the modern, Americanized usage, in which the word “dumb” is often dropped in front of the movie title’s core vulgarity, well, he does it justice.

In a brief exchange of e-mail messages last week, Mr. Roach said he was not quite sure who among the film’s writers and producers came up with the title, which was in place when he joined the project. Other titles were considered, he said, but none “came close to fitting the story better.”

The title seems slyly ambiguous: the audience is supposed to wonder whether it belongs to Mr. Carell or to Mr. Rudd.

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“I always overthink the titles on all my films,” Mr. Roach explained. He concurred that the movie’s underlying idea was to turn perceptions inside out by questioning “the way the mainstream world sees unique, odd people as losers.”

Be that as it may, the world’s pop-cultural apparatus is now left to deal with a word that was once “regarded as so vulgar as to be taboo” in the home of the Yiddish language aficionado Leo Rosten, according to his 1968 treatise, “The Joys of Yiddish.”

The comic Lenny Bruce said he was arrested for using it onstage.

According to an online account by Russ Walter, at angelfire.com/nh/secret/2Judaism, NBC once banned the word from a “Saturday Night Live” skit, written by Al Franken, in which Lincoln was to use it in addressing Richard M. Nixon. Representatives of NBC and the “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels would not confirm the incident when contacted recently. Liz Fischer, one of the NBC representatives, said the network had cleared advertising for Mr. Roach’s new movie to run after 9 p.m., when younger viewers are presumably not watching.

The Classification and Rating Administration, which assigns film ratings, as of Monday had not announced one for Mr. Roach’s new film. One person connected with the film, however, said it was aimed at a PG-13 rating rather than the more restrictive R.

Only recently, Warner Brothers transformed its police-buddy film “A Couple of Dicks” into “Cop Out” after being advised that the networks, detecting a sexually oriented double-entendre, would restrict advertising of the original title.

How Paramount will translate its new title when releasing Mr. Roach’s movie in, say, Turkey, where it is set to open on Sept. 24, is not clear. The studio might take a cue from the cartoonist Al Capp, who twisted the offending word into shmoo, which was a further revision of the euphemism schmo.

At The New York Times, where the word is still considered potentially offensive, the title of Mr. Roach’s film may be mentioned only sparingly. Still, advertisements for the movie would probably pass muster, said Steph Jespersen, director of advertising acceptability for The Times, though a final decision will be subject to review by a standards editor and possibly a “rabbi or two.”